Katherine Smith, a local from Pinebluff, is
an Alaskan greenhorn and accidental poet.
She’s living to make life that is art.
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Calling the Light Home
by Katherine Smith
Overnight, the living room becomes a small
forest. We stock the evergreen tree with enough
tinsel, popcorn and dried oranges to delight
nesting birds, or at least, the cat. We deck the halls
with seed-bearing charms — holly boughs with
waxy red berries, junipers with dusky blues. And
then there’s mistletoe, mind altering, medicinal,
and an invitation to an ancient spell of vitality,
tacked atop our Christmas door frames.
Mistletoe was the chosen talisman of Frigg,
the Norse goddess of love. She vowed to kiss all
who passed beneath its boughs after her son
Baldur was resurrected from a mistletoe arrow
wound. Earth-based Anglo-European cultures
likely observed the oath since ancient times.
Part photo-synthesizer and part parasite,
Mistletoe’s tiny rootlets siphon energy from
the cambium and sapwood of their host oak,
pine or cacti. Like many native parasitic plants,
mistletoe often works symbiotically in the
ecosystem. It provides berries and nesting for
birds and slow-release fertilizer for the forest
floor when it takes down an occasional tree.
Thousands of species are known as mistletoe,
owing their Anglicized translation of “dung
twig” to their germination in the excrement
of birds who ate the sticky berries. But there is
only one medicinally used mistletoe, Viscum
album. Modern herbalists percolate the dried
leaves in alcohol to make a potent medicine
for hypertension, vasoconstrictive headaches,
petit mal seizures, and tinnitus. It is used as
an oxytocic nervine that in small amounts can
potentiate the power of sedative formulas.
Legend says that a couple passing beneath
mistletoe would kiss, eat a berry and repeat,
becoming inebriated to the point of hallucination
by the time they emptied the cluster. In 1820,
Washington Irving, the author of Sleepy Hollow,
commemorated “the mistletoe, with its white
berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the
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Local mistletoe is easiest to spot this time of year as the barren branches of winter
uncover the gift normally hidden in plain sight. As you ride through the countryside, keep
a lookout for this gem of the season. And by all means enjoy a kiss or two!
pretty housemaids.”
Hemlock dwarf mistletoe is the only species
I knew during my winters in Alaska. It grows
on the warmest, easternmost part of the state,
down through British Columbia on its way to
California. Its two subspecies, western and
mountain, stress their host hemlock to grow a
burl, and then, when many small twigs thrust
from one location on the trunk, a densely–
branched structure called a witches’ broom.
Rather than spread the parasitic bane of
the Forest Service, I made imitation mistletoe
of dried cranberries dipped in white paint
during the one Christmas I couldn’t come
home to Carolina. I missed the chunky spruce
in my family’s living room and railroad-foraged
cedar in my Memaw’s, but refused to cut down
my own tree. Instead, I crowned all the doors
and windows of my basement apartment
with wreaths of hemlock poached from a
nearby park, woven with red wool and the
impersonating mistletoe. Never mind that the
needles proceeded to shed all over the carpet
and met no match in my second-hand vacuum
cleaner.
In a season of five daylight hours, those
wreaths hung like portals between my life
underground and the perspective of the tree
canopy. They brought indoors the sounds
of where they were collected. The hissing of
icebergs grating together, the rush of belugas
rising to breathe on their way to sea, the song
of Western tanagers and chickadees, and all the
whispers of slumbering woods. Yes, the light will
return, they said, but see it already here. What
else could infuse the evergreens, rouse the birds
from sleep and swell the flesh of frozen berries?
Christmas is the gift of even more life to come in
the new year, imitated in gifts to dear ones and
kisses stolen under the eaves. We need only step
through the door to see. ☐
No. 137 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.33
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